In some situations, it is desirable to communicate a message to a group of people within a defined geographical area or location. For instance, it may be desirable to warn people in a building to evacuate the building, or warn people in a city of an approaching tornado. While devices like sirens are sometimes employed for this purpose, these fail to provide detailed information about the situation, emergency, and/or actions to be taken. In other situations, it may be desirable to facilitate communications between different emergency response personnel (e.g., firefighters, police, paramedics, search and rescue, etc.) that use incompatible communication systems. For example, it may be desirable for emergency personnel responding to an emergency in a building to be appraised of the dangers and actions being taken by others within the building.
While most people and emergency responders now own and/or carry wireless communication devices (e.g., mobile phones, two-way radios, pagers, personal digital assistants, etc.), there is no convenient way for a local operator to contact one or more of these devices without going through a service provider.
In other emergency situations, for instance, in a hotel, it may be desirable to have the possibility to override a television signal sent through coaxial cables to some or all rooms, indicating the existence of an emergency and, possibly, replace the original transmission with an animation of the evacuation routes.
Consequently, a multi-channel communication device is needed that has channel-specific signal insertion to allow inserting data and/or control signals into one or more specific communication channels.